Thursday, May 18, 2006

A heated discussion

Today in class we talked about racism in how news stories were brought to the public. Before this discussion started we read one article and one op-ed piece that dealt with the Natalee Holloway and Latoyia Figueroa cases, with most of the discussion centering on the op-ed piece. Most of the people in class were talking about the concepts and ideas the author was trying to express and whether or not she was being facetious in the blatant hypocrisies she employed in her writing, and I understood and fully agreed with some of the points brought up in class, but as a copy editor I was looking more at the not-so-obvious discrepancies that appeared. There were little ones, like the use of unwed mother instead of single mother, or saying a woman was an immigrant and later saying she was here legally rather than saying she was a naturalized citizen or using other, not-so-loaded, terminology for her status.

Then there was a less obvious but, to me, more egregious one; this one was how the columnist used the names of the women. After the first reference to Latoyia Figueroa and the Hernandez woman--I'm sorry I don't have the article in front of me so I can't remember her first name--the author only identifies these women by their last names, occasionally with Ms. preceding it. Natalee Holloway, on the other hand, is never referred to by anything other than her full name and Laci Peterson is either referred to as Laci or Laci Peterson. The only time either of these two women is not listed by both names is when the article talks about the Peterson case, which is not so much a reference to her as it is to both her and her husband.

These are just a few of the problems that I found with the way this columnist wrote about this subject.

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